Re: [TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 10:11 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: So I was in high school, but I was affiliated with a major university (one that, yes, did have a Unix source license) because I held a part-time sysadmin job. For the curious, it was Penn State University; not a huge CS powerhouse like, say, MIT or CMU, but it held it's own as a large research university (they have, for instance, hands-down the best Acoustics department in the world. Also, while it may seem quaint, they hands-down have the best agriculture department in the world: kind of important for that whole food thing. :-)). I didn't go there as a student, but lived in the town during high school and cut my teeth on their computers. I can say from first-hand experience that it was NOT easy to get access to Unix source code there. The cadre of university system administrators that formed something of a cabal did not hand it out lightly, and it took significant time to gain the sort of trust that would result in you getting access to it. I strongly suspect that if a random CS student had written to UCB asking for access to the BSD source code, and that had gotten back to the aforementioned cabal, it would not have gone well for the student. Lots of intrusive questions would have been asked; angry letters written and placed into files. Uncomfortable meetings with academic advisors and the university computer security officer would have taken place. Questions of academic malfeasance or expulsion may have come up, etc. Was any of that justified? No, not really. I suspect much of it came from an outsized sense of trying to protect the university from potential litigation should a poorly-secured student machine on the dorm network be compromised with AT&T proprietary material/trade secrets on it, etc. As became clear a few years ago, perhaps that energy should have been spent looking into the school's football program, but of course the local sysadmins had nothing to do with that. Anyway, for what it's worth, as a student/low-level staff in the early- to mid- 90s? No, you weren't going to get access to Unix code using the site license -- even from Berkeley -- unless you were on a first-name basis with a number of folks in the local computing community. And that wasn't going to happen for the majority of students for logistical reasons if nothing else. The point was if you were at all in the community, it was pretty easy to Please see above. It may have been easy, but that didn't mean there wouldn't be consequences due to misunderstandings or what have you. Which brings me to my point... many developers abandoned it - and most of The point I was trying to make was that the newbie didn't know any better but didn't want anything else, even if s/he did know any better. Plan 9 was available after 2000 gratis, but by then no one wanted it (more's the pity, IMHO). If I think about the systems that were interesting in the research sphere in the late 80s early 90s, they were V, Chorus, Minix and Xinu for education, Mach, NeXTSTEP, etc: again, no one really wanted them. They wanted Unix a la SunOS 4/System V instead. As you noted, BSD's future looked dubious, so they got Linux instead: it was the next closest thing that didn't look like it might result in a trench-coated G-man breaking down your door. Linux filled a gap that a lot of people were looking to have filled. I think you are absolutely right. It's kind of sad, in a way. Oh well. - Dan C.